Yes, I think conformity is one of the greatest dangers we face culturally. Nothing frightens me more than agreement - whether it's agreement not to play or read, or an agreement to love. But of course, agreement not to do something, in matters of culture, is the worst agreement of the lot.

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My questions are related to writing, and deciding on the Narrative Voice of your fiction.Would you describe how the "narrative voice" has changes from your early stages as a novelist? Are there general trends for the point of view of your novels? Do you choose at the outset and try to maintain that decison?

I found a voice as a writer before I found anything else. Maybe there is nothing else. But for many years my novels were described as voice-driven, which I was led to understand was a drawback. The voice I found - self-mocking, argumentative, perplexed - was the only voice I felt confident in employing. In my last few novels, other voices have insisted themselves. I put it like that because it doesn't feel like a matter of choice. As for "maintaining" any decision about a book, I think it's creative suicide. A novel will go the way it wants to go and the novelist has to get out of the way of it.

Dear fishface99I can't believe you're really from Manchester. If you were, you wouldn't be starstruck. There are always stories left to tell because we invent them. The fantasy that Manchester is the most creative place on earth, for example, will perpetuate itself for ever.

Yes I get discouraged enough to be endlessly talking about the subject. Rabelais called them the "agelastes" - the people who don't get jokes either on principle or because they lack the intellectual wherewithal. Comedy is the very breath of culture - our first and earliest mode of comprehension. Show me a culture that can't laugh and I'll show you a culture that's had it. On the other hand, a culture that laughs too much has had it too (see Live at the Apollo).

Yes, from time to time. I miss the cliffs, the pasties and the singing in the pubs. Also the being banned from the pubs. I haven't been banned from a pub since I left. Haven't had a decent pasty, come to that, either.

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You are well known for your passion for Dickens. But who would you say your work has a closer affinity with, Dickens or Austen. For my money Austen was the sharpest comic tool in the box, and so sympathetic to the comedy inherent to English eccentricity.

I revere them both. The line back from Jane Austen to Dr Johnson engages me more than the line back from Dickens to Smollett and Fielding. There's a good essay trying to get out of every one of Jane Austen's novels and I love a good essay. eg think of Anne Elliot in Persuasion, telling Captain Benwick that he should abandon poetry for a diet of moralising prose. I love the chutzpah of that. But Dickens offers an exhilaration of a different order. I love the bleakness of both: in Jane Austen the sense that there's another novel underneath the one she's written - this one telling of love unfulfilled - and I love the increasing blackness of Dickens' novels. Neither insults the reader with optimism.

Hello Howard. As a fellow Mancunian I wondered how much you thought growing up there might have influenced your perspective and sense of humour? Would you have been a different writer if you'd been a southerner?

Hello fellow MancunianYes, Manchester has had a huge influence on me. No-one does self-deprecation better than a Mancunian, not least as Mancunians do it with swagger. We also know that if we are to laugh at other people we must laugh at ourselves first. Are there Southerners who are writers?

What is it about Jewishness makes for such great writers? Is it simply a culture of valuing education or is there more to it than that in terms of cultural perspective? And to what extent has discovering Saul Bellow perhaps late added to your voice?

Jews became the People of the Book when they were first exiled. It's not uncommon for marginalised people to value (or even overvalue) culture. You fight with what weapons you've got. The constant sense of impending doom also does wonders for a sense of humour. And if Jews have the blackest humour of anybody it's because they know how much there is to fear out there.I admire Saul Bellow a lot but I can never quantify the influence another writer has on me.

Rabelais is too far back to be an influence but he is a reminder of the novel's origins in murderous comedy. Henry Miller I have read recently, but that was because he was the favourite novelist of Guy Ableman, hero of Zoo Time. I wanted to see what he saw in him.

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I very much enjoyed your contributions to the British Council Literature Seminar on Shakespeare in Berlin at the end of January. There, it was mentioned that you intend to "rewrite" Shakespeare's play "The Merchant of Venice". Will that be as a play or as a novel? When will that book be published?

Although that question is of course being answered in a complex way in "The Finkler's Question", is there any short answer to the question what being Jewish means to you?

I am "retelling" The Merchant of Venice as a novel. It will be published in April 2016. There is no short answer to the question of what being Jewish means - in fact that's exactly what being Jewish means, knowing that there's no short answer to anything.

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Your latest book predicts a dystopian world dictated by philistinism, a world where valuable culture is dead. Do you believe that our society is irreversibly heading towards that direction? And are you at all influenced by Guy Debord and his concept of the Spectacle?

Culture is always dying. That's how it reinvents itself. The real killers of culture are the optimists - the Panglossians who think all's for the best in the best of all technological worlds. We thrive on pessimism. As for Guy Debord, I don't know his work. He sounds to me like a French Marxist film-maker, but that's just a stab in the dark.

Post your questions for Howard Jacobson

When Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question won the Man Booker Prize in 2010 it was said to be the first funny novel to have done so for decades. Howard Jacobson himself disputed that, both on behalf of previous Booker winners and because he wasn’t sure it was appropriate to call The Finkler Question a comedy at all. As he put it in a Guardian article at the time: “To my ear the term ‘comic novelist’ is as redundant and off-putting as the term ‘literary novelist’.”

His new novel J, set in a chilling future version of Britain, marks a first venture into dystopian fiction. It has once more put him in the running for the Booker. In a Guardian review John Burnside said it “may well come to be seen as the dystopian British novel of its times... In a society as sick as this one, advising someone to avoid inspiring, or feeling, disgust is like telling them not to catch cold. It simply can’t be done.”

So does J show Jacobson casting off the comedy mantle once and for all? Or is post-apocalyptic dystopia what he’s really been writing all along?

Join him to discuss these and other issues in an hour-long livechat on Tuesday 2 September at 2pm BST. Post your questions in the comments section below, and he’ll endeavour to answer as many as possible.